One of our cats, the gray tabby female, hasn’t been eating well lately. We’re not sure how long this has been going on. Has it been since late February, around the time the first victim of COVID-19 in Washington State died in a hospital 10 miles from where we live in Seattle? Did it start […]
Month: May 2020
My father isn’t Superman. He doesn’t wear shiny Spandex and a cape, he can’t fly. If he could, he would be out of there. Out of there immediately, flying up and out into the clean air. The nursing home where my father lives is now crawling with Covid-19. Thirty-eight cases and counting, ten of those […]
For a brief period of my life, the Hubble Space Telescope would shoot me an email with a link about once every two weeks. Then I would click and wait. Then hundreds of thousands of stars would spill across my monitor, lighting up cells in my eyes with photons from a screen from a file […]
Wallace Stegner wrote, “Seen in geological perspective, we are fossils in the making, to be eventually exposed again for the puzzlement of creatures of later eras.” That’s if you’re astronomically lucky. Most of us turn to dust or ash, and the bones we leave are eaten by roots. Few get to be fossils. If you’re interested […]
A few days ago, I was walking idly along a mountainside near my house when I noticed the lower branches of a ponderosa pine, heavy with bullet-sized pollen cones. Intrigued by their purplish color, I plucked one, piercing it with my thumbnail. The juice came out magenta as a beet. Natural inks have been enjoying […]
It’s a cliché in art to have a sudden burst of inspiration. I was just looking at the bird, and boom, the poem just…came to me! Or, I was scuba-diving off the coast of Fiji and I couldn’t believe it — the song just wrote itself! I think of that quote from Anne Lamott’s Bird […]
Can I just tell you about something funny that happened/is happening? I’ve been working at a university, and one of the most appealing perks—given I’m not anywhere in the world of tenure or sabbaticals—is the free tuition on any course in the whole place. I could get an MBA…for free! I could become some crazy […]
